Interesting thoughts everyone, I appreciate the discussion. I apologize for misunderstanding your point Stangler, and that does make more sense. But to me it seems all the more reason to stray away from level based MMO's into skill based, because you can transition your character as you wish, and mix and match skills that you desire. One of the major obstacles to this type of character development is class balance, because many players will ALWAYS try to find the most powerful combination, so making sure that none are too weak or too strong is a constant struggle with this game design. The other problem is, as I stated earlier, designing content and making sure that players know where they can find the optimal places to go to progress their characters, so they don't feel lost or bored.

I personally think generated quests would never work, because they would always seem shallow and meaningless, and become just another grind to hit level cap with. In addition I think that in general developers seem to have become too enamored with quests as a way to alleviate the grind feeling, to the point that they have turned "quest grinding" into something very similarly repetative and mind-numbing. This leads to the quests blurring together and becoming muddled, with the "quest overload" that I discussed earlier. I think that if you were to create longer quests, and create them in a way that the player is only working on one quest chain at a time, it would allow them to more easily follow the narrative and give them a greater chance of having an emotional response. Give a player too many quests to do at once and the narratives blur, and any power they might have had becomes lost.

Emergent Gameplay is definitely something similar to what I am looking for, more specifically Emergent Narrative. But the problem of using that design in an MMO setting is the simple fact that you can't trust players to not ruin the experience for others (either purposefully or by accident), and if they do plan on having empty servers very quickly.

Another solution I am considering has to do with a pretty major shift in MMO thinking in both long term character progression as well as short term goals. I think in some ways it has a higher chance of success in the MMORPG/FPS setting such as I am working in, but it still has some major hurdles. I'm still working out a lot of the details, but as it seems people here are both helpful and insightful I may bounce the idea off this forum once I have it a bit more concrete.

Quote:Emergent Gameplay is definitely something similar to what I am looking for, more specifically Emergent Narrative. But the problem of using that design in an MMO setting is the simple fact that you can't trust players to not ruin the experience for others (either purposefully or by accident), and if they do plan on having empty servers very quickly.

This isn't as large of an issue if, like the other thread discusses, the world reacts to the players.

I can't summarize the other discussion accurately, but in broad terms, the issue isn't about getting other players to react to players with more character, but getting the system to react to your character with more respect for how your character behaves.
This means the system has to keep track of what kinds of choices your character makes (meaning, choices you as a player make with that character) and that the system (NPC's, Quest options, market/shop options, mob reactions, skill/attribute options, etc...) reacts to your character differently than another character that has made other choices.

This means, as I did say in the other thread, that the system bounces off of the player, rather than the player bouncing off of the system.

In so doing, the players feel a connection with the system because it appears to recognize their character as an entity and not just a thing that they deliver content to the same way as they do to any other entity.

In short, tailored customer experience rather than universal customer experience; responding to your customer's actions rather than giving them a cookie-cutter product regardless of what they do.

That will achieve a more "emotional" contact with the MMORPG system by players.

Whether or not they will play more "in-character" by chat form is not really an issue (since you can't really get everyone to enjoy this).
It's whether or not they start thinking about how to get things done based on what they know the world will do in reaction to their character...to think from their character's options and not their options as a player.

The main problem I see with that approach is that depending on how it is executed you can either end up with players changing the world too much for other players, and the players that didn't get to experience something because of another player are frustrated and disappointed. The alternative is to wall every player off with phased areas and mobs so they each have a "unique" experience without missing out on things they wanted to do because of another player, but at that point why even bother to make it an MMO?

A good example of this kind of design gone wrong would be Waking the Sleeper in EQ1, which on many servers caused horrible drama and tons of players being extremely upset, many of whom eventually quit. It was a great experience for the few hundred or so players that got to experience the event, but they irrecovably altered the world in a negative way for everyone else.

I think that the only way this works is if you create your world in such a way that everything is in constant flux (whether between multiple factions, or between players and a seperate NPC force), and so if you play long enough you'll eventually be able to see everything you want to see. At which point the "lore" the players create becomes more important to whatever backstory and storyline developers try to create. And I say that could possibly be a very very good thing.

Quote:Original post by Ultenth
I think that the only way this works is if you create your world in such a way that everything is in constant flux.

That's the idea.

The only way there ends up being a problem is if an element of the system (for example, and NPC shopkeeper) is limited in memory so that they only keep in memory a given amount of players. However, if the given element has a memory that keeps all players in memory that have frequented in X time recently, then the system continues to understand players and react to them.

The idea isn't to have limited time events that wall off people from interaction, or to have on-mass alterations to the system due to players, but instead to simply react, not change, to players.

Change is only something that should ever be done manually; not autonomously.

Quote:Original post by Stangler
Instead the player should be able to explore and get quests as they explore. So if there is a quest to kill bandits the bandit will drop an item that starts a quest. The player can still hand the quest in at some NPC in town.

There can also be at least two types of quests. If you want players to enjoy some story then create a clear line between quests and missions where quests are epic and missions are the run of the mill stories that players stop reading after a bit.

I think that it would be good to have dynamic NPC enemies that will go away or be replaced over time if they are beaten up a lot. So a server can destroy an encampment of orcs but eventually those orcs will be replaced by some other enemy.

There can be an ebb and flow of NPC spawning that reflects what the players are doing. If this is the case there would need to be a quest system that also adjusts to the changes in the NPCs.

Another advantage to starting quests with the NPC enemy is that it allows you to create a more dynamic PVE environment that includes quests in a relatively efficient manner since the NPCs in town do not have to start different quests based on what NPC enemies are out there. Instead they just collect all quests at all times.

This is a very good extension of thought to the adaptable concept, (you would need to make careful planning to avoid problems such as Ultenth was expressing, but with replenishing populations, the change is more a large reaction without something permanently disappearing) but why have the quest linked to the item when you can have the quest generated from the NPC themselves based on your character.

Because you are someone that is on X quest, interacting with B NPC will generate an offering of Y quest from B NPC.

Or, because you are someone that is on X quest, that has come into contact with A situation, involving B NPC, and dealt with A situation in N manner, then B NPC offers Y quest, where they could have offered none, or V,W,Z quests depending on you, your party, and what you chose to do.

Just a thought,

Instead of having the shop keepers store the data about the players that have frequented them, you could have the players keep track of the shop keeps (and whatever other NPC's) that they've interacted with and store the appropriate data there.

You can then limit each player to only storing the 10 most often visited or something.

That way each shop keeper doesnt have to store a ton of data, but the places the player goes to a lot will seem to remember them.

That's a good stepping-stone concept, since systems today may or may not be capable of transporting so much data, but eventually (with the advent of larger and larger bandwidth and storage systems) such a player-selected reactionary system won't be needed.

However, for many of the smaller systems people will be making, that is a good alternative indeed.